A History of Adult Supervision in Silicon Valley

The tech world has long flirted with the idea that young companies need to hire experienced CEOs from the outside.

If Jeff Immelt, the 61-year-old just-retired chief executive officer of the world's leading industrial corporation, 1 really does end up taking the reins of the world's most controversial and valuable tech "unicorn," it will be a first. No one quite that prominent and experienced from the world outside of Silicon Valley has ever been brought in to run one of its companies.

Still, Immelt's potential move to Uber Technologies Inc. does evoke echoes of some past attempts to bring "adult supervision" to bear in the world of tech. Since the days of Bill and Dave at Hewlett-Packard, company founders and their homegrown successors have been dominant in Silicon Valley. But a few big exceptions stand out. [ Bloomberg ]

English teaching service VIPKID raises $200M and reportedly hits a $1.5B valuation

That wouldn’t just give VIPKID unicorn status — it also exposes a huge amount of demand there is in China and other countries as a tool to learn English from English speakers. VIPKID had raised $100 million in financing in August
last year and already seemed to have quite a bit of momentum at the time. This financing round was led by Sequoia Capital, including a strategic investment from Tencent. [ Tech Crunch ]

Why Is This VC Firm Doubling Down on Women Entrepreneurs? Because It's Good for Business.

Nisha Dua is a true girl’s girl. When the former lawyer and Bain consultant joined AOL in 2013 to embrace her love of media and technology, she quickly found herself leading a charge to support young women who were also interested in the space. Now the 34-year-old is co-founder and partner at the AOL-backed BBG Ventures, which invests in female-led companies and has bankrolled some of today’s buzziest brands. Why? Because it’s good business.

Bumble, a dating app that forces women to make the first move, reportedly turned down a $450 million acquisition offer

Bumble turned down an acquisition offer from Match Group, the owner of Tinder, OKCupid, and Match.com. According to a report from Forbes' Clare O'Connor, Match offered $450 million for the
3-year-old startup about two months ago. Bumble rejected the offer.

Bumble was founded by Whitney Wolfe, a cofounder of Tinder who left in 2012 and filed a sexual harassment suit against the company. Wolfe later settled out of court.

Forbes points out that because Wolfe previously filed suit against not only Tinder, but Match.com and IAC as well, she would have been working for the same company she sued had Bumble accepted the buyout. [ Business Insider ]

Know Your VC Is the Yelp for Venture Capitalists

The venture capital and investor community as a whole has been under fire most of the summer as harassment allegations swirled around some of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors. When it’s time to pitch for money, most startup founders and entrepreneurs rely on the word of other entrepreneurs to find out which investors are the best to work with. But who can you really trust when it comes raising your next round of funding?

While this has been the way for ages, it’s obviously got its flaws as some entrepreneurs may not be totally honest with each other for one reason or another. Enter, Know Your VC, a new resource that popped up to help startup founders anonymously share insights about their interaction with investors – good and bad.

Money in, money out: An examination of US VC invested vs. exited

Last month, we wrote about how the ratio of VC investments to exits in the US is at a record high—11.3x. Based on the feedback to that post, we decided to dig a little deeper and explore the amount of US venture capital invested vs. capital exited.

The results tell a somewhat different story. In the first half of 2017, $37.8 billion of venture capital was invested in US-based companies, while $25.2 billion was exited, per the 2Q PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. That makes the capital invested-to-exited multiple historically elevated at 1.5x but lower than 2015's mark of 1.62x—a high mark since the 1.64x recorded in 2009.

While this trend is much less alarming than the investment-to-exit pattern we've noticed in 2017, it's worth noting to help illustrate the current venture landscape. [ PitchBook ]

Studio 1.0: Mark Zuckerberg

Australian vehicle valuation and auction company Pickles has announced the launch of Pickles Ventures, an innovation arm which will focus on incubating early-stage startups with ideas that align with the company’s goals. The ventures division will be supported by $10 million from Pickles, with the incubator set to focus on giving selected startups the chance to leverage the company’s lengthy experience in the automotive sector. Startups will also be able to tap into Pickles’ wide resources base, helping them create new offerings which benefit the vehicle industry. [ Startup Daily ]

Built by a teenage entrepreneur, Faqbot wants to eliminate the old FAQ pages with chatbots

French teenager Mathis André had been tinkering around building websites when he dropped out of school at the age of 16 before eventually becoming interested in bots, the software which has exhibited a lot of promise in areas like customer service and e-commerce. André, who is now 17 and living in Brussels, is the co-founder of Faqbot, which is developing chatbots that are trying to get rid of traditional ‘frequently asked questions’ (FAQ) pages. [ Tech.eu ]

Veteran Facebook exec Andrew “Boz” Bosworth is taking over consumer hardware efforts at the company, including projects under groups like Building 8 and Oculus. The announcement was made internally by Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, Business Insider reports. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the appointment to TechCrunch.Bosworth, who joined Facebook in January of 2006, has been instrumental to a number of core product features, including perhaps most notably, the News Feed. He has most recently served as the company’s VP of ads and business platform. [ Tech Crunch ]

Billionaire Moguls Join Musk, Bezos in Race to Outer Space

Think billionaires and outer space and three names quickly come to mind: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. It turns out, though, that they have plenty of company. There are 13 others among the world’s 500 richest people who have an investment in a space enterprise, according to data compiled by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and consulting firm Bryce Space & Technology. While technology tycoons dominate, the list also includes casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who’s backing a lunar mission, and Mexican retail and banking billionaire Ricardo Salinas, an investor in satellite network OneWeb. [ Bloomberg
]

Is Social Capital trying to end-run banks by creating IPO 2.0?

The investment firm Social Capital filed an S-1 form today to create what appears to be a financial vehicle that could allow startups to go public without the help of banks. The Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. — which will raise $500 million by selling 50 million shares to undetermined investors — calls itself a “blank check company.” Working with Credit Suisse, it has been “formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses.” [ Re/Code ]

What Edith Yeung of 500 Startups Is Cooking Up in VC

Full transcript: LimeBike President and co-founder Brad Bao answers bike-sharing questions on Too Embarrassed to Ask

This Urban Farming Accelerator Wants To Let Thousands Of New Farms Bloom